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 p.3 #14 · p.3 #14 · The Beginning Of The End Of Fashion Photography As We Know It? | |
StoneCrop wrote:
I find the current shock and backlash against AI generated photo-like images by photographers rather ironic, as a great many commercial photographers have been embracing every other trend that’s leading in this direction, starting with photography itself, which replaced realist painting, drawing, and printmaking, moving through the film and digital ages and culminating with various AI tools like Topaz, all of which caused a big change in how people make their images. Painters had to grapple with the advent of photographs making their mundane task of rendering the world as it appeared rather obsolete, and so they reinvented themselves and started making art that the new machines couldn’t make. And they also used the technology of photography as a tool to help them see the world differently. It took a lot of hoopla and heated discussions about what was our wasn’t art, but in the end, most of the art world now agrees that what matters isn’t so much the medium or the method of its production, but the ideas and emotions expressed - the experience it creates in the viewer.
Will AI image making render lots of jobs obsolete? Yes, most certainly. But so did photography. And digital photography. But that didn’t stop the artists, the ones who had a vision, they just adopted the new tools if they wanted, or adapted to the new landscape, And kept creating something meaningful. The ones left behind are the technicians who identified and invested in the method and the medium. Comerce dictates the commercial landscape, and anything that increases efficiency and saves money will win, which is why all the pro photographers have jobs in the first place - at a particular era in time, their tools and medium was more efficient and cost effective than the alternatives (eg hiring a painter or draftsman, or a film photographer even). So then the question becomes, if you’ve been doing fashion photography for a company like Levi’s and then lose your job to a computer, are you going to celebrate that you no longer have to produce images of people and then photoshop them into some ‘ideal’ form so that a soulless company can make more money? Are you going to look for ways to make images that are unique enough that a computer would never think of them? Are you going to consider what story you’re telling and what effect your images will have and how to best get those ideas into the world? Will you adopt these new technologies and see what they can do for you or will you remain committed to the ones that you have grown comfortable with? Will you move on to a subject or style that hasn’t already been photographed millions of times, so that you are no longer making images that machines can visualize?
Can AI images be used in harmful ways? Yes, those deep fakes are proof. But it’s not like the people who wanted to be deceitful haven’t already been using photography and whatever other tools they have to lie and deceive for decades (centuries? Millennia?). Look at Fox News. Look at the Russian state. All you need to do is dredge up an image or a video from the archive and put a new caption on it and people will associate the caption with the image and conclude that one describes the other. Bam. Photography has been a medium of deceit for as long as it’s been a medium for accuracy and truth. Its place in the seat of honor at the table of truth has made it the ideal tool for deception, in fact. Hence the deepfakes.
One plus side of ai image making is the accessibility of it. It used to be if I had an idea of an image I wanted to make, and I wanted it to look like a realistic representation of the world, I had to invest in camera gear, and as we all know, to get certain types of images that can be a huge investment. Before that I’d have had to learn how to draw and paint, which is another type of investment. Now all I need is access to a web browser, which I can get free at a library if I want. The paywall to photo-like image making is coming down, and the time and distance between having an idea and realizing that idea in visual form is rapidly decreasing. The barriers for entry into photography and video have already begun to come down with increasingly capable technology into things like smart phones, and this lets many more people create content and tell their stories and capture the world as they see it, instead of relying on a few big powerful wealthy institutions to bring us the stories and images that they want us to build our world from. And, conversely, the corporations will cut expenses wherever they can and not care a whiff about the people losing their jobs, because that’s how they got to be corporations with lots of money in the first place.
Will there be a great loss of jobs due to AI? Yes, but those are principally technician type jobs, which are inherently the most easy to replace with machines. As has been stated already on this thread, many technicians jobs have already been lost in the advancement to digital photography. Will photography continue to have a place in our world? Most certainly, just as drawing, painting, and manual printmaking do. They are each mediums that let us interact with our world and communicate visually in different ways, and at the end of the day, isn’t that what it’s about? Looks like we have one more tool in the toolbox, and In the grand scheme of things it’s probably less world-changing than photography was, but who knows, maybe it’ll be more.
Did Spotify and other streaming services kill music? No, but they changed the recording industry, and in particular dealt a big blow to the brick and mortar record stores. But then again, radio changed it all too a hundred years ago. And before that, the early recording industry ushered in an end to the era of composers. And printable written music and words had a huge impact on oral cultures. But music lives on in one form or another, because people like to make it and people like to listen to it, across the whole spectrum from live music played on acoustic instruments in the same room to techno and dubstep that produce all their sounds digitally.
Walter Benjamin wrote about this broad topic 90 years ago in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. It’s worth a read.
I think if we shift our perspective from being defined by the method or medium we become much more free. Instead of thinking “I’m a photographer”, you could decide, like Joel grimes: “I’m an illusionist with a set of tools”. Or you could decide “I’m a storyteller with a set of tools” or “I’m an artist” etc. if the tool works for you, use it. If not, then don’t. Simple as that.
I’m 40 now. Before I took photos I was a painter (and before that, as a kid, I learned to make digital art using the state of the art 2d and 3d programs available in the 90s. I was a nerd). For college I went to art school. I studied all sorts of ways of making an image, from egg tempera and distemper to oil, acrylic, watercolor, mono prints, cyanotype, salted paper, palladium, silver gelatin, digital. I spent months off my life in Italy poring over Renaissance and baroque paintings trying to figure out how they were made, and what made the masterpieces different from the other paintings made at the same time period with the same materials, techniques, and subject matter. It came down to a lot of qualities impossible to put into words, but which included composition, the use of space, and a certain kind of touch, and a particular way on which all the technical elements combined to serve a visual and emotional impact. the best painting I made in that time included an image which I found on a google search depicting the kind of scene I wanted to paint, and which I modified in photoshop to look like it was behind a fence (another image I found on a google search), and after rearranging the pieces until I got the composition I wanted, I projected it onto my panels using an opaque projector, and then painted it. I painted the background scene in a fairly out of focus manner and painted the fence in front in an impasto manner - the paint was actually coming off the panels. I built them to be life size for a fence and from a distance people actually thought it was a photo behind an actual fence (oddly enough from up close the fence looked like cake Frosting). Now to many purists, my methods might have been considered ‘cheating’ because I projected my image before painting it, or because I based my image on someone else’s who presumably had a copyright which I ignored… but In the end nobody cared, because it was art and so they just engaged with the way that it impacted them, and the matter of its construction was irrelevant. The art world had to reckon with those concepts long ago and it moved on (apart from stuffy conservatories of course)!
The world of photography seems to have largely lagged behind in addressing a lot of those concepts, and held on to a notion that photo = truth, a concept which is now being examined much more in popular awareness even though since its inception It has been used as a medium for illusion.
And for a reality check, just remember: computers made your lens, and your camera. They made the car you drive. They made the device you’re viewing this forum on. Your job and the tools you use to do it exist because of computers, robots and factories, and may have put someone else out of business because they used older, less efficient, more manual human-based processes. Or do you ride your horse to the event you’ve been hired to document and sketch the portraits of its guests, and return to your studio so that you can make use of your oil paints which are stored in pig bladders, and spend weeks layering paint on canvas, to complete your image?
AI is Just one more step on the path of image making evolution. I hope we all can adapt to the changing climate just like our ancestors did 
Ps sorry for all the typos, I was typing this all on my phone using ‘swipe’ gesture based typing, and guess what, AI powered ‘autocorrect’ doesn’t always get it right…...Show more →
Just to expand a bit
An interesting thought by John Szarkowski.
"What the photographer taking the picture and the historian viewing it must understand is that while the camera deals with recording factual things and events that form the subject of the photograph, it only produces a perceived reality that is remembered after the thing or event has passed. While people believe that photographs do not lie, this is an illusion caused by the mistaken belief that the subject and the picture of the subject is the same thing."- John Szarkowski
"Because we see reality in different ways, we must understand that we are looking at different truths rather than the truth and that, therefore, all photographs lie in one way or another. Today's technological advances in digital manipulation of images that the public sees regularly in photographs and films now only makes it easier to understand what has always been true."- John Szarkowski
"All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth." - Richard Avedon
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